AI, ROBOTICS & BIG TECH - ARE WE TRYING TO FIGHT THE LAST WAR?
1/ Think of future wars, and movies like Terminator come to mind.
2/In the wake of our wars in Iraq & Afghan, the mil has pivoted to peer & near-peer adversaries as the dominate threat of the future.
3/As analysts gripe abt not wanting to lose our COIN expertise & lessons learned, I take a different approach, because we failed to learn 1 important lesson from these conflicts.
4/The military has doubled down on AI, robotics, unmanned vehicles, F35, (any & all expensive, hard to replace hardware, that involves as few humans as possible), & Spec ops, since the relative drawdowns in Iraq & Afghan.
5/Are we fighting the last war in the sense that our technological abilities/& its effectiveness & further leaning on SF, has caused us to ignore the human element of those wars & continue down the road of monopolizing our tech advantages w/ little regard for the former?
6/I am of the belief that major wars will always be man intensive, & we are ignoring history at our own peril.
7/Have warfare, tech & ppl changed so much that we can now simply send in the robots, let AI control our hardware & decision making, & depend on multi-billion $ pieces of equipment to win the day?
8/There will always be countermeasures, the enemy always gets a vote, & the undermining of these tech advantages is the number one way to beat America.
9/The argument is not that these new hardwares won’t be effective or that they have not been to date, but that we missed a key lesson from these past 2 wars.
10/The weakness I believe, that will now only grow worse, is our inability to produce large formations of men in the field. We believed our tech made up for our lack of manpower, & in many cases it did, but what has been the outcome of these few colonial expeditions?
11/No matter the organization you are a part of, you can always see the pendulum swinging one way or the other. I have heard nothing concerning the question that we may need masses of troops, & not more advanced hardware. We have only continued to push down that road.
12/What are the consequences of too few troops that are able to deploy? What happens when you find yourself fighting on equal terms w/ an enemy that is prepared to lose many individuals & is able to even the odds by degrading our tech advantages?
13/Our Army & Marine Corps is not prepared for even a medium sized battle of attrition. And the further concentration of funding into more & more hardware exacerbates the fact.
14/Our mil. is not built for a war of attrition. It is designed to overmatch in every domain: Air, sea, cyber, land, space. Our tech is designed to achieve total superiority, & allow fewer, more specialized units to do much more than what larger units would have done in the past.
15/Our last wars exposed our lack of manpower. At our peak, w/ 15 month deployments, short stints at home & covering down on other commitments, we were only able to put 170k troops in Iraq & 30k in Afghan (2008). 
16/ 200k...at the peak of the war, from all services, & with very few of those even leaving the large bases throughout their deployment. Am I making any sense yet as to those numbers & how that translates to a weakness?
17/Don’t get me wrong, the tech advances & attempting to stay ahead of competitors is necessary in many instances, but it’s our seemingly complete blindness to the consequences of smaller, tech savvy, specialized militaries is where my concern grows.
18/I’m not advocating to replace tech w/ humans, I’m trying to convey that tech may be neutralized for both sides in the future. Where does that leave us?
19/ Does the assumption that tech will always improve drive us toward an even more specialized and hardware intensive force? Is there a situation where we find our enemy bringing effective countermeasures to our advantages?
20/It has continued to be a logical progression. Replacing soldiers w/ tech, leaning on our superiority in conflicts & using only specialized units w/ advanced tech to execute the most dangerous missions.
21/Spec ops/drones have become the go-to solution in as many instances that is practical. W/ this continued specialization, what happens if these troops/tech become ineffective, & their small numbers start to matter?
22/Our recent wars w/ low historical casualties, & huge tech advantage, still couldn’t win. Does this expose the lack of a large numbered Army, and is this a prelude to disadvantages in the future? That’s my big worry...
23/We could not deploy enough manpower to hold ground, assumed we could do it with great ISR. Those capabilities were amazing & still are, but our tech crutch is a possible weakness heading into the next big war.
24/My purpose here is to be contrarian, & maybe the consensus turns out to be correct, but we must think abt the consequences of these decisions,& what could happen if we are caught in a situation where our tech is no longer an advantage,& if we find ourselves fighting as equals.
25/Are we naive enough to believe that we have the greatest military in the world when you strip away the technological edge, and face off man on man?
26/There were many situations where our units were maneuvered on by illiterate & lightly armed foes, where if it weren’t for air superiority, guided bombs, or artillery, these units may have been lost in the field.
27/What if in the next fight we find these advantages neutralized or hamstrung?
28/Does the next big war become human intensive? Does tech offset all/most of our advantages?
29/We seem to be driving daily towards the newest phones, faster computers & any state of the art tech. The military is no different.
30/It seems a common theme by most analysts that we are driving toward less human exposure to warfare, more tech eliminating soldiers positions & a consensus that we Americans, who are so casualty averse, will see ourselves more removed from the battlefield than ever.
31/The assumption that tech will always be effective & that we can continue to eliminate service members in exchange for AI, Killer Robots & unmanned aerial/ground/sea vehicles may be our weakness.
32/I have not seen/heard in recent memory anyone in a position of power/influence speak abt hedging these tech leaps w/ cheaper/simpler tech, more bodies, & more affordable options. It’s all about the latest & greatest (most expensive too).
33/This is reflected in our defense budget year after year. More funds for expensive, hard to replace hardware, built by one or a couple factories.
34/The industrial base is also not set up to deliver much of anything. Fewer ship yards, less factories, specialized hardware & rare earths all offshored.
35/While DOD tries to reverse this to a certain extent, it amplifies the prob by throwing the majority of funds at a few specialized companies, making fewer & more expensive goods.
36/America is in the worst position given the above facts concerning manufacturing, specialization, recruiting shortfalls etc. Given the realities, doesn’t it seem that the war we are most likely to lose is one that requires a large amt of manpower?
37/By fighting the “Last War” we continue to double down on specialization, technology, etc… which seems like a logical progression, but does that blind logic leave our flank exposed when a reversion to the mean happens, and we have to fight without all/most of our crutches?
38/So in the end, if the worst is realized and we fight a war that requires intensive manpower, what will be the result?
39/My great fear is that we lose, & ultimately it will be our risk aversion, technological crutches, & a lack of imagination that costs us...
40/the consequences of that loss may turn out to be greater than the last few losses that happened in backwater countries, which have little long-term value to our most important geopolitical interests.
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